Iconoclastic Magazine Publisher Marvin Shanken Adapts In A New Era Of Media

Media
I cover media: innovators, tech disruptions and business strategies.

Marvin Shanken.Shanken Communications

The first thing Marvin Shanken—the magazine-publishing maverick and impresario who for the last 40-plus years has built a business based on his own lifestyle passions—tells you is that his success is all due to the content.

“We invest in very relevant information for readers who are passionate about the topics we’re writing about, and in all instances, we’ve established enormous credibility for the work we do,” he says. “It comes back to the fundamentals of good journalism.”

That’s a pretty common refrain among successful media entrepreneurs. They point to their content as the cause of their success, but it’s also reductive. After all, the history of media is littered with great products that failed and sub-par products that succeed. Content is a differentiator, but business success is more complicated.

In a recent conversation with Shanken, he elaborated on his approach to content, as well as other elements in the success of his 46-year-old Shanken Communications. He also reflected on the state of the media industry, how his company has changed, and where it’s going.

In short, the continuing success of the company—publisher of Wine Spectator, Cigar Aficionado, Whisky Advocate, plus a variety of B2B newsletters and magazines, comes down to a combination of many things, of which great content is just a part. There’s Shanken’s instincts, plus his willingness and ability to innovate, plus external market tail winds, plus his relentless drive, and of course, luck. And there are also some unconventional business approaches—illustrated in his choice of KPIs.

New York City-based Shanken is perhaps best-known for CigarAficionado, the 26-year-old title that celebrates the luxuries, rituals, trappings and vanities associated with cigars. In many ways, the creation of CigarAficionado launched a modern cigar craze and extended into the mainstream an image of cigars as a product for successful, affluent people. Over the years, Shanken has made a name with CigarAficionado by landing high-profile Q&As with often reclusive people, including Michael Jordan, Francis Ford Coppola, and Fidel Castro, the person probably more associated with cigars than anyone else in history, excluding perhaps General Ulysses S. Grant and Winston Churchill.

But Shanken Communications started 20 years earlier, in 1972, when Shanken paid $5,000 to acquire Impact, a wine-and-spirits industry research newsletter. Today, Shanken’s Impact Newsletter is read in more than 200 countries. In 1979, the company acquired a struggling Wine Spectatorfor a reported $40,000 and added panel-based ratings and tastings the following year. Today, the magazine is one of the world’s foremost wine authorities, with 18,000 wines reviewed annually, an audited circulation of 385,000, and a total reach of more than 3 million readers worldwide.

CigarAficionado has a circulation of 250,000 and a frequency of six times.

In 2010, Shanken Communications acquired Malt Advocate, which Shanken says then had less than 10,000 paid circulation at the time. He renamed it Whisky Advocate and is set to release the brand’s first circulation audit in September, which he says will show a paid circulation of 100,000.

“To a certain extent I’m lucky in that I got into growth industries, although I didn’t know at the time,” Shanken acknowledges. “I springboarded from trade to consumer and transformed Wine Spectator into a very successful consumer magazine. While maintaining growth in trade magazines, I launched the first cigar magazine in the world. I acquired Whisky Advocate, and during this period the whiskey market has flourished.”

As the conversation continues, you pick up other elements that have shaped Shanken’s company. (It’s actually less of a conversation than a discourse, but Shanken answered all the questions I asked.) One core element is that his KPIs are unconventional.

Revenue, he says, is secondary. “It’s never been about the revenue for me,” he insists when asked about the topline size of the company. “It’s always been about product and profits. I focus on profits. We have approximately 200 employees, and everybody lives well. The revenue number is irrelevant. I’m a private company."

Subscription renewals are critical. “Honest to God, all I want to do is turn on my readers so they renew,” he says. “I want to share with them my loves for wine, whiskey and cigars. And that love came before the business.”

So is circulation transparency. “My audiences are totally audited and totally qualified—there are some people that tell the advertiser that their circ is X, and 70 percent of the X isn’t even printed copies,” he says. “An ABC audit you can’t mess around with—they come in and actually audit.”

Price is an indication of value. The higher the better. “My pricing strategies have always been counter to the industry,” Shanken says. “You can get a magazine for a dollar now. But I raise my prices. Same thing with my advertising rates. Same thing with events. I truly believe that the price you get reflects the quality of what you’re offering.”

Shanken is given to superlatives. “I’m the only magazine [in the category] that’s audited—a lot of the other publications, when they do give their circulation, they’re grossly inflated,” he says. Or “I’ve earned the trust of a number of very successful people who are not inclined to trust the press and don’t give interviews.”

But beneath that, you sense that his personal drive has led the company to persevere and grow over the course of nearly five decades. In the macro sense, the most transformative piece has been events. Digital has been secondary, used mostly as a tactic to push print-magazine subscriptions and event participation. (Although the Wine Spectator site has a paywall for certain features, and an app. The digital offerings also have a strategic purpose, Shanken says. “The average age of the person who comes to the website is 10 years younger than the magazine,” he says. “We don’t market to millennials because they don’t pay for anything. But we give them some access, and when they become more affluent, then they know which brands they want to come to.”)

The company’s first event was the New York Wine Experience, which began in 1981 and attracts over 6,000 attendees annually. This event is pricy: Attendees pay $2,500 for a ticket, Shanken says, and they come from all around the world.

Wine Spectator’s Grand Tour events, where enthusiasts sample dozens of highly-rated and off-the-beaten-path wines, began in 1993. They’re held in rotating cities each year. In 2019 they’ll be in Las Vegas, Chicago and Miami. Generally, each event attracts 1,500 participants.

Cigar Aficionado’s Big Smoke also launched in 1993, and is held in rotating cities including New York, Las Vegas and Miami. In Las Vegas it attracts 3,000 attendees.

WhiskyFest started in 1998—before Shanken acquired Malt Advocate. It attracts 2,000 guests per event in half a dozen cities.

NEW YORK, NY - FEBRUARY 08: Media columnist for the New York Times Jim Rutenberg and American publisher and founder of M. Shanken Communications Marvin Shanken participate in a discussion onstage during the American Magazine Media Conference 2017 on February 8, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images for American Magazine Media Conference)

On the B2B side, the Impact Annual Marketing Seminar started 42 years ago, in 1976. It’s held in New York City and attracts 300 industry professionals. The Market Watch Leaders Dinner, begun 30 years ago, is also held in New York, and has 300 attendees.

The event side of the business has also served to soften the secular decline in print advertising. “There’s no question there’s been a dramatic reversal in advertising in general away from print and toward digital,” Shanken says. “Some of my magazines are down and some are up. It’s a concern going forward. But as we adapt, one of the drivers is that I’ll less become concerned about advertising over time.”

Shanken is coy about where he sees the company’s growth in the years ahead. He has a file that he calls MRS [Marvin R. Shanken] Projects. “If I can execute a third of these projects, it will be a very different company,” he says. “Some initiatives fall into the category of joint ventures. Some of them are doing in the cigar and whisky industry things that I’ve done very successfully in the wine industry. Some of them are things I’m doing that we can extend to different subjects. You have to adapt or die. We’ve been adapters for our entire history,” he adds.

One thing he's emphatic about is that he's not going anywhere. "I have slowed down," he says. "I only work seven days a week now, and 24 hours a day. I get up in the morning and can’t wait for the day to begin, because my joy is in creating. I have never entertained selling the company, although I have had many offers over the years by well-known publishers. If I had gone to one of those companies and said I wanted to start a cigar magazine, they would have laughed me out of the building."

Still, the magazine industry around him has become a frequently inhospitable place. "There’s been a transformation that I never believed would occur to such a great degree,” Shanken says. “I’m still in disbelief. I still have hope that someday magazines and print will be more relevant—although it doesn’t seem that way now. So my job is to continue to make my magazines more and more relevant so people who are passionate about my markets. And so far so good.”

Tony Silber is a journalist, business executive, and event organizer. He's served as content director and general manager at numerous media brands, including Folio:, Expo, PR News, Min, Audience Development, Internet World and the Bridgeport Post. In 2003, he founded the acc...